Pakistan's Balancing Act Under Field Marshal Asim Munir: Mediating the Iran–United States Confrontation while Navigating Strategic Entanglements in a Multipolar Order

This article looks at the reasons and the process behind the emergence of Pakistan as the chief mediator between Iran and the United States in the 2026 encounter between the two entities that was led by Chief of Defence Forces (CDF) Field Marshal Asim Munir. The research uses a qualitative single case study design using a process-tracing methodology to explore the causal processes by which this historically marginalised Middle power has acted as a mediator, with Qatar and Oman being rendered unavailable by the conflict. The study is based on primary sources, such as official government statements, parliamentary archives and the diplomatic communications which are publically available, as well as literature and secondary sources, including peer-reviewed scholarship on strategic hedging, mediation theory, military diplomacy and civil-military relations. Theoretically, the analysis combines four concepts: Walt's (1987) concept of balance of threat, Goh's (2005) concept of strategic hedging, mediation typology of Touval and Zartman (1985), and Putnam's two-level games model (1988). Its key argument is that Pakistan's mediation efficacy was due to the interplay of three essential, yet independent, conditions: (1) its structural positioning; (2) institutional consolidation; and (3) transactional credibility. The counterfactuals indicate that other actors would have had disqualifying limitations that Pakistan did not: Saudi Arabia, China, Turkey and a hypothetical predecessor army chief. The article adds to the literature on middle-power diplomacy in that it shows how, under certain circumstances, structural dependency, which is usually regarded as a limitation of strategic autonomy, can be the very basis of the creation of credibility. It also builds on the existing hedging body of literature by offering an example of how postures used for hedging in defensive positioning can be redeployed as offensive diplomatic instruments during systemic crisis.